The Near Apocalypse Scenario
by R.J. Anderson
Summary: In the wake of the unthinkable, the implausible becomes inevitable for a grieving Sheldon and Penny.
1. Chapter 1

THE NEAR-APOCALYPSE SCENARIO  
_Part One_

"Sheldon? _Sheldon?"_

Penny hissed his name into the darkness, but there was no answer. The knot in her throat tightened with every step she took down the hallway, and as she pushed the bedroom door open her hands were shaking.

Sheldon was lying on his back in the exact middle of the bed, hands folded across his chest and a tiny smile pursing the corners of his mouth. He looked so peaceful that Penny felt sick at the thought of waking him—and yet what else could she do?

"Sheldon!"

His Mona Lisa smile faded, replaced by a slightly petulant frown. But he still didn't wake. Penny touched his shoulder—and just like that he bolted upright, as though every cell in his body had snapped from OFF to ON at once. "Penny," he complained as he knuckled the sleep from his eyes, "how many times have I told you that you _cannot_ be in my room?"

Penny wrung her hands, shifting from one bare foot to another. "I know, but I fell asleep watching TV after my shift and when I woke up it was on the news—"

And with that the last of her denial crumbled, and the tidal wave of grief finally hit. Penny collapsed onto the end of Sheldon's bed, put her hands over her face and cried.

"I assume there is some reason for this emotional outburst," said Sheldon, but he sounded doubtful. Which only made Penny cry harder because it was so _Sheldon _to say something like that, and he was the least comforting person she knew, but he was all she had.

"The plane," she sobbed when she could speak. "The plane Leonard and the others were on, coming back from Germany—something went wrong with the engines—and it crashed—"

"Penny, I find that exceedingly unlikely," said Sheldon. "For one thing, the conference was in Switzerland, not Germany, so I conclude that you have confused _Zurich_ and _Munich_ and have no reason for concern. Have you tried calling Leonard's cell phone?"

"I had the _flight number,_ Sheldon, because I was supposed to pick them all up at the airport, and their connecting flight was out of London not Zurich or Munich or whatever, and of _course_ I called Leonard's cell phone, do you think I'm _stupid?"_

Sheldon didn't answer. Penny's tears still threatened to overwhelm her, but now her fury was stronger. She wanted to grab Sheldon and shake him, rattle some emotion into that soulless computer brain of his. "He didn't answer his phone," she choked. "Neither did Raj, or Howard. The plane _came apart_, Sheldon—"

For a moment Sheldon sat very still. Then with an abrupt motion he flung the covers back, swung his legs around and stood up. Penny had one blurry second to realize that he was wearing Batman pajamas – or at least, they were black and had that yellow bat-signal thing all over them – before he strode out to the living room and snatched up the remote for the TV.

_"…carrying one hundred and eighty-seven passengers, was attempting to make an emergency landing in St. John's, Newfoundland when the explosion occurred. Helicopters and several rescue ships have been circling the crash site some fifty miles off the coast of Labrador, but so far no survivors have been found …"_

Sheldon stood in the half-darkness with the light of the television flickering over him, hollowing out his eyes and lining his mouth with shadow. He didn't speak, and there was no expression on his face. He just stood there until the news bulletin had played itself out, and then he turned off the TV and sat down very slowly on his end of the sofa.

Penny couldn't bear to look at him any more. She pressed her face against the doorframe, wishing the cold wood was someone warm and solid and real, someone who would put his arms around her and stroke her hair. Because Sheldon would never do any of those things for her, even at a time like this; he didn't like touching and he just didn't _do _emotion…

"Penny."

His voice was a husky ghost, floating through the silence of the apartment. "Penny."

She took a deep, shuddering breath and straightened up, wiping her eyes on the sleeve of her robe. "Sheldon," she said as she walked out to him.

He looked up at her, his eyes wide and earnest. "Penny, Leonard can't have died in a plane crash. It defies all the laws of probability."

"I know."

"Penny, I think you fail to understand the magnitude of the unlikelihood—"

"I don't care!" Penny shouted at him. "It doesn't matter about the facts or statistics or the engine specifications or whatever, there _is_ no argument about this, it's _happened _and they're all—"

No, she couldn't say it, not that word, it was too horrible. "They're gone," she finished in a whisper, and clutched her own elbows for comfort as she dropped onto the sofa beside him.

There was a long silence. Then:

"Penny?"

"Yes, Sheldon."

"How am I going to get to work? And who's going to drive me to the comic book store?"

Ordinarily Penny would have been enraged by those words—how dare he make this all about _him_? But she could hear the quavering note in Sheldon's tone, the way his voice cracked the word "store" into two syllables, and when she looked at him she saw that his face had gone absolutely white.

Dr. Sheldon Cooper, PhD, with his IQ of 187 and his vast knowledge of physics and his carefully regulated existence, had just lost three of the four people he considered friends. Without Leonard—and Raj and Howard too, in their own weird enabling sort of way—he had no one of like mind to share his lonely existence, to humor his whack-a-doodle quirks, to help him find his way through the big, noisy, messy, illogical world.

She'd lost some friends, but Sheldon had lost everything.

"Oh, honey," said Penny, and wrapped her arms around him before he could protest. She pulled his head down so that his cheek rested against her chest, rocking him gently. "Sweetie, it's okay."

"It's not okay," Sheldon retorted, muffled against the collar of her robe. He felt like a bundle of cold sticks in her arms, but he didn't pull away. "It's bad, Penny. I have no plan for this contingency."

And now he was shaking. Realization dawned on Penny, a thought that had been growing inside her for the past few months but never really come into focus until now: Sheldon had feelings. Not just shallow feelings either, but _deep-down_ feelings that he bottled up because he didn't know how to deal with them himself, let alone share them with anybody else.

But now that she was holding him, his trembling body spoke so much louder than words, and she felt as though she'd just been handed a Sheldon-to-Penny dictionary. A magic book in which phrases like _I have no plan for this contingency_ translated easily into _I never thought I'd lose Leonard, I couldn't even bear to think about it long enough to figure out what I'd do if it happened, and now he's gone and I didn't even get to say goodbye._

He still hadn't pushed her away, either. In fact he'd turned his face into her shoulder, and as she stroked his hair she could feel the tension leaking out of him until he was actually—almost—nestled in her arms. Not resisting any more, not pretending he didn't want to be touched, just letting her give him the only comfort she could.

"I'm so sorry, Sheldon," she murmured. "I loved him too."

His head jerked up, the vulnerability in his expression replaced by something harder and more irritable, reminding her abruptly that he wasn't a little boy at all. "I find that difficult to believe," he said. "For one thing, you're overstating the warmth of my feelings for Leonard by a considerable degree, and for another, if you _loved_ him as you put it, you surely would have responded to his somewhat pathetic but nonetheless persistent overtures of romance with a good deal more enthusiasm."

It took Penny a few bewildered seconds to parse that sentence, but there was no hesitation about her answer. "Just because I didn't date him doesn't mean I didn't love him as a _friend_, Sheldon. Leonard was very sweet, very kind—" No, she couldn't go on like this, she was tearing up again. She sniffed, and finished in a hoarse voice, "But just a friend."

For a moment Sheldon's eyes still burned into hers, accusing, disbelieving. Then his gaze dropped, and with disarming meekness he laid his head against her shoulder again. Penny was about to ask him why it mattered when a shudder ran through his body, and the collar of her robe started to feel warm and slightly damp.

Oh. Oh no. She couldn't bear this, it felt like someone was hammering a tent-peg straight into her heart. "Honey," she said wildly, gripping his face and lifting it up to hers, "sweetie, Sheldon, don't, I know, I know it's awful but I'm here, you've got me, I'm not going anywhere. Please don't."

His eyes were swollen, fringed with long dark lashes and even in the semi-darkness, startlingly blue. His mouth worked without sound, framing syllables she couldn't decipher, and Penny was just about to ask him to repeat it when she felt his big hands wrap around the small of her back, gripping her waist with the urgency of a drowning man.

"Penny," he gasped, and for the rest of her life, no matter how many times she replayed that moment in her mind she couldn't remember exactly how it happened. All she knew was

that Sheldon's forearms on either side of her felt like bars of sun-warmed steel –

how the stubble along his jaw rasped the heels of her hands (somehow she'd never thought of him as needing to shave) –

when she lunged or he twitched or both of them leaned forward, closing that last tiny distance—

and that somewhere in the middle of the darkness and the grief that still tore at them both, Penny and Sheldon found each other.

Their mouths locked together like high-powered magnets, as though something in each of them had been pulling toward the other all this time and all they'd ever needed was to stop fighting it. Her fingers wrapped around the back of his head, tangling in the soft thickness of his hair, while he clenched her hipbones in a way that was both possessive and weirdly chaste, as though he wasn't even thinking about anything below her waist or even his own, only that he needed to hold onto some part of her so she couldn't run away.

Except he didn't need to, because Penny wasn't going anywhere. She was ninety-nine-point-nine-nine-nine percent sure that Sheldon hadn't kissed anybody before in his whole life, at least not voluntarily, but he was learning fast. His mouth was soft and hard in all the right places, mobile without being sloppy, and now he'd let go of her hips and those big warm hands were travelling up her back—

Drowning in Sheldon, deaf to anything but her own grief-dazed need for comfort, Penny didn't hear the key rattle into the lock, or the door swing open. Only when the lights snapped on and Sheldon suddenly leaped away from her like a frightened tarantula did she look around to see…

"Leonard!" she shrieked, scrambled over the sofa and flung herself into his arms.

Leonard dropped his suitcase and staggered back against the doorframe with a breathless "oof". Clearly an armful of hysterical Penny was not what he'd been expecting to find in his apartment at 2 a.m., and from the bewildered look on his face, he had no idea what she was doing there.

"You're not dead!" Penny sobbed, squeezing him tight to reassure herself he was really there. "You weren't on the plane—and we thought you were—it was horrible, oh, Leonard—"

Leonard gave her an awkward pat on the back. Then he let go of her and said plaintively, "You thought I was dead, so you made out with Sheldon?"

Penny's breath stopped in her throat.

_End of Part One_


	2. Chapter 2

THE NEAR-APOCALYPSE SCENARIO  
_Part Two_

The moment Leonard entered the apartment, Sheldon had jumped away from Penny with such alacrity that he'd practically broken the light barrier. Not that _practically _was a useful standard of measurement—Sheldon spared a microsecond to mentally berate himself for sloppy thinking—but at any rate he'd removed himself from Penny's immediate vicinity, and there'd been no reason to believe that Leonard had observed anything unusual. Sheldon was congratulating himself on having escaped a potentially disastrous situation when two facts belatedly penetrated his brain.

_One:_ Leonard was alive, and that meant that barring extraordinary circumstances, Raj and Howard were also alive (to which the tiny part of Sheldon that was still proud of having won a prize for perfect attendance at Sunday School said _Hallelujah_) .

_Two:_ Leonard had just uttered the words "you made out with Sheldon" to Penny (to which the rest of Sheldon's brain said _Oh, crap on a silicon wafer)._

Sheldon could only hypothesize that this was what ordinary people meant when they spoke of having _mixed feelings,_ and his conclusion was that he didn't like it.

"It wasn't like that," Penny was protesting. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes still red from tears. "Sheldon and I weren't making out, we just… I mean, I was upset, we were both upset, because we thought you were—"

"Yeah, dead. I got that part." Leonard scrubbed wearily at his eyes. "Look, I've been travelling for the last seventeen hours and I'm pretty much a zombie at the moment. Can we talk about this later?" And without waiting for an answer (or even saying _good night_, how rude!) he picked up his suitcase and slumped off down the hallway to his room.

Seconds ticked past, and then Penny said in a hoarse voice, "Okay. Well… I guess I'll go back to bed now. Great news about Leonard and the others, huh? Thanks for… I mean, I'm sorry I woke you up."

"No matter, Penny, it was an understandable mistake," said Sheldon, rising briskly from the sofa. "No doubt the mystery of why Leonard, Raj and Howard ended up on an earlier flight and also neglected to turn on their cell phones upon landing will be resolved tomorrow. Good night, Penny."

He was halfway to his bedroom when he realized she hadn't responded, and it occurred to him that his farewell might have been inadequate. He paused and added over his shoulder, "Sweet dreams."

"Yeah," said Penny faintly. "You too."

The door clicked shut behind her.

"Okay," came Leonard's muffled voice from inside the master bedroom, "what exactly _was_ that?"

"That would be Penny leaving," said Sheldon, as he headed into his own room and shut the door.

He had just positioned himself accurately atop the mattress and arranged the covers to his satisfaction when there came a shuffling in the hallway, followed by a tentative knock.

"Leonard, as you have been quick to point out to me on past occasions, it is two a.m.—" Sheldon glanced at the luminous face of his atomic watch. "Correction, it is two-seventeen a.m. Surely there is no need to elaborate on why I have no intention of carrying on a conversation at this hour?"

"Oh, come on, Sheldon! Don't you think we should, you know, _talk_ about this?"

"To what are you referring? Really, Leonard, I don't know how you can expect me to answer when you insist on being so vague."

"You…? And Penny…?"

That whining note in Leonard's voice could really be quite irritating at times. "I am your roommate," replied Sheldon. "Penny is our neighbor. If you wish further details, I suggest we continue this at a more appropriate time—say, seven hours and forty-two minutes from now."

There was a pause. Then:

"Okay," said Leonard defeatedly, and Sheldon permitted himself a little, triumphant smile.

* * *

It was ten o'clock on a Sunday morning, none of his friends were dead, and Sheldon was making pancakes while wearing his vintage _Zot!_ limited edition t-shirt. All in all, a good day—indeed, he could easily have upgraded his assessment to _excellent,_ if not for the lingering fatigue. He stifled a yawn, flipped over the pancakes with an expert flick of the wrist, and reached for the electric kettle.

"Rough night, huh?" came Leonard's voice from behind him.

Sheldon detected sarcasm in that statement, but he chose to ignore it in favor of filling the kettle and plugging it in. Coffee would be ill-advised as a stimulant given his sensitivity to caffeine, but strong black tea should prove adequate…

Leonard sighed. " Sheldon, I'm not mad, I just want to know what happened, okay?"

"Fine." Sheldon set down the tea canister and turned toward him. "Penny was distraught, so I gave her a hug."

"A hug," said Leonard in a dubious voice.

"Yes." Sheldon forced himself to keep his face straight, though he could feel the muscles in his cheeks beginning to twitch. "And that was when you came in. So you see, Leonard, your fears that Penny and I were 'making out' in some kind of sordid bacchanalian celebration of your demise were quite unjustified."

"I didn't say anything about—" Leonard looked taken aback. "Bacchanalian?"

"Well, I have observed that any time _you_ and Penny have become physically close in the past, there were large quantities of alcohol involved—"

"What does _that_ have to do with anything?"

"—however, I can assure you that both Penny and I were quite sober, and that our embrace was nothing more than a gesture of mutual solidarity and friendship."

There was a strained pause, and then Leonard said, "…Okay."

Satisfied, Sheldon returned to his tea-making. He had just rinsed the pot with hot water and set it aside when he heard Leonard add in a subdued tone, "That was nice of you, giving Penny a hug."

"Thank you," replied Sheldon.

"Only next time—"Leonard's voice rose to a near-hysterical pitch—"you might want to try it with a _little less tongue!"_

"Whoa, whoa, whoa," broke in Howard incredulously from the doorway. "Did I hear what I think I just heard? You're accusing _Sheldon_ of putting the moves on _Penny?"_

"Dude," added Raj, his brows crooked with concern, "I know yesterday was rough, but hallucinations are not a good sign."

"I wasn't hallucinating," Leonard snapped. "Tell them, Sheldon."

"Oh, all right." Sheldon huffed an exasperated breath. "Yes, I kissed Penny. But I'll have you know there was no tongue activity involved!"

He glared at his fellow scientists, daring one of them to make some vulgar retort. But all they did was stare at him—Leonard reproachful, Raj disbelieving, and Howard with something like awe.

A soft knock sounded at the door, and Penny poked her head in. "Uh, hi, guys," she said.

Immediately they all fell into forced-casual poses, including (to his private disgust) Sheldon himself. "Hi, Penny," they chorused.

Penny's face creased into a frown. "What's that burning smell?"

"Oh, dear lord, the pancakes," exclaimed Sheldon, and snatched the griddle off the stove. He was scraping frantically at the carbonized mass in the bottom when Penny touched his shoulder.

"Can I talk to you for a minute? Outside?"

"Penny, now is not a good time!"

"Sheldon." It was Leonard at his other side, sounding resigned. "Go talk to her. I'll look after the pancakes." He nudged Sheldon out of the way and began doggedly scrubbing the griddle clean.

"C'mon, Sheldon," said Penny, tugging at his arm, and Sheldon found himself unable to think of any further excuses to delay. He trailed after her like a particle trapped in a Boltzmann simulation, through the apartment and out into the corridor.

"I _knew_ I shouldn't have taken down that hidden camera," he heard Howard mutter behind him.

* * *

"Penny, this is not _outside,_" objected Sheldon as Penny opened the door of her apartment. "Not that the hallway could be said with any accuracy to be _outside_ either, as that term would technically refer to the exterior of this apartment building and not to any point within its walls, but nevertheless, your apartment is clearly _inside._"

"Sheldon," said Penny in a warning tone, "shut your pi-r-squared-hole and get in there."

"Oh, all right. But I—" He stopped, eyes widening as he took in the state of her apartment. By now he had seen it in every possible form of disarray, but this…

"I know," Penny said. "Looks great, huh? I cleaned it this morning."

She spoke brightly, but the pouches beneath her eyes and the immaculate condition of the apartment made plain just how early she'd started her cleaning. In fact, Sheldon calculated an ninety-five percent probability that she hadn't slept at all…

"Look, Sheldon, I've been thinking, and… I think we need to talk about what happened. Last night. When we… kissed."

Her hands twisted together as she spoke, and her face was full of apprehension. Sheldon could only pity her: it must be difficult for ordinary folk like Penny, constantly at the mercy of their own unruly emotions. Fortunately, his superior reasoning faculties enabled him to rise above such things.

"There's no need for anxiety, Penny; I quite understand. You were overwrought, and I also experienced a temporary lapse in judgment. I see no reason that this should affect our relationship."

"You… don't?"

Strange, she didn't sound especially reassured. In fact… But no, he'd never been good at reading non-verbal cues. "Of course not," he said.

"But you kissed me back. Are you telling me that was just… some kind of weird reflex? That you didn't _feel_ anything?" She stepped closer to him and laid a hand on his chest, looking up into his face. "Don't you feel anything right now?"

Sheldon considered this. "I feel hungry for pancakes," he replied.

Penny let out a little, dry-sounding laugh and let her hand drop. "Right. So I guess that after I left last night, you just tucked yourself in, went off to sleep and forgot the whole thing?"

Actually it had taken him two hours and forty-three minutes to calm his turbulent thoughts and stop fidgeting long enough to sleep. The swollen tingling of his lips had been both distracting and unexpectedly fascinating — but that was irrelevant to the discussion.

"I didn't _forget_, Penny," he said, irked by the implication that his memory was at fault. "I examined the evidence, and came to the conclusion that our kiss was an aberration brought on by stress and fatigue, and should be treated accordingly. And _then_ I went to sleep."

"Oh, yeah? So what brought you to that _conclusion?"_ She surrounded the word with waggly, derisive air-quotes, daring him to prove his work.

Sheldon's right hand twitched. He glanced about the apartment for a white board and marker, found none, and decided the Magic Pointy Finger would have to do. "It's very simple," he said as he sketched the equation rapidly in the air. "If last night proved that Sheldon and Penny minus Leonard equals Sheldon _plus_ Penny, it appears equally true that Penny plus Sheldon will equal Sheldon and Penny _minus_ Leonard."

Penny scrunched up her face and considered the invisible formula. "Okay, maybe Leonard would be disappointed if we got together, but he's a sweet guy and he wants both of us to be happy, so he'd get over it. And besides…" She spoke slowly, but with growing confidence; he could practically see her synapses firing— "I'm pretty sure you just proved that as far as you and I are concerned, Leonard equals zero."

This couldn't be happening. Penny doing math and defeating him with his own logic? It was all wrong—

Like her spotless apartment

and the burnt pancakes

and her coming into his bedroom at 2 a.m. to tell him his friends were dead

and the way his mind had gone blank when he'd kissed her—

Sheldon scuttled back and bumped into the apartment door, fumbling blindly for the handle.

"This isn't really about Leonard, is it?" Penny's eyes were soft as she laid her hand over his, holding it still on the doorknob so he couldn't escape. "You're just scared."

"I am not," said Sheldon, but he couldn't think of anything else to say.

"Sweetie, you don't like change, I totally get that. But sometimes things change for the better, you know?" She reached up and stroked the hair away from his temples, soothing. "Yeah, we drive each other crazy sometimes, and maybe that's why you think this could never work. But you know something else? You're the best guy friend I've ever had."

Sheldon frowned. "That hardly seems reasonable, Penny. Leonard and the others are much better at pretending interest in your inane chatter—"

His words were cut off as Penny pinched his mouth shut, none too gently. "How about you let me finish before you dig that hole any deeper. Yes, they are, but that's kind of my point. You've always been honest with me. Even when you're babbling scientific mumbo-jumbo, or acting so arrogant and condescending I could smack you, you've always treated me like a person, instead of some hot chick you want to sleep with. And I've never had that with a guy before, and I thought it was great, but when we kissed last night I realized—we could be more than friends, and it could be _amazing._"

Sheldon could feel the cold metal of the door behind him, Penny's warm, waiting presence in front of him. He couldn't argue with her logic, and yet—

"No," he said.

"Give me one good reason." She folded her arms, her chin at a defiant angle. "Come on, Brainiac. If it's all about the logic, then I want to hear it."

He didn't want to, but he was tired, and she was Penny, and he needed this to be over. "Because when you care about people, they die."

She didn't say anything. She just _looked_ at him. And slowly it dawned on Sheldon what he'd just said.

"Sheldon? Hey, Sheldon, you there?" The voice was Leonard's, coming faintly from the other side of the door. "Pancakes are ready, uh, I mean, if you're done talking and all."

But all the while Penny's gaze held his, and she spoke softly so only he could hear: "Sometimes. But most of us live."

He hadn't even known there was a knot inside him until this moment, when it suddenly loosened and fell away. "Penny?"

A little smile turned up the corners of her mouth. "Sheldon."

"I have two things to tell you, and I want you to remember them, because I hope never to have to say them again." He stepped up to her and took her hands in his. "One: I'm an idiot. And two: you're right."

Her smile blazed like a supernova, and she threw herself into his arms. He hugged her awkwardly for a moment, and then a little less awkwardly, and by the time he bent his head to kiss her it wasn't awkward at all. She smelled of dust and lemon soap and Windex, and she tasted like tears and sleep, but none of that mattered because there were an infinite number of universes and Penny was in all of them, right where he wanted her to be.

Her hair was so soft he couldn't help stroking it, but then her fingers raked up his back and she bit his lower lip in a way that made him gasp _"Bad_ kitty," which made her laugh and then—

"Sheldon?" repeated Leonard's muffled voice tentatively.

Penny sighed against Sheldon's mouth, then ducked under his elbow and opened the door. "Hi, Leonard. Sorry to keep you waiting, we were just—"

"Making out," said Sheldon from behind her, barely repressing his impish glee at Penny's shocked look and the equally stunned expression on his roommate's face. "So with all due respect to pancake tradition, Leonard, I suggest you all go ahead and eat without me."

And without waiting for an answer, he reached past Penny and firmly shut the door.

THE END


End file.
